The Demonstration of Photorefractive Synaptic Connections for an Integrated Photonic Crossbar Array

For the past decade, the progress in artificial intelligence (AI) has been requiring an exponential size increase of artificial neural networks (ANN), at a rate close to 10 times that of Moore's law [1]. Consequently, the signal processing in ANNs is fueling a compute demand that is unsustainable for general-purpose computers, both in terms of energy and hardware requirements [1,2].